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CASE STUDY: Learning.com

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Written by Liz Barnett   
Monday, 06 March 2006 17:00

Portland, Oregon-based Learning.com is a fast-growing software company providing online services to students and teachers to help integrate computer technology and education into their curricula. With a user base of over 30,000 teachers and over 1.5 million students accessing its subscription-based hosted products, Learning.com must continue to innovate and meet market needs while continuing to provide robust and scalable products.

 

Description

 

Agile project team:

  • Began as a co-located team of 10 developers and 3 product managers; team now includes several remote and offshore members.
  • Delivers 2 week iterations, with 3-4 iterations bundled into each release cycle.  

Software tools:

Agile driver(s)

 

  • Time to market  - continually improve products, support new technologies and educational needs.
  • Productivity - reliably meet release dates tied to school year calendars.

Hurdles 

 

  • "Don't overstuff your releases." Prior to Agile process adoption, development team had a backlog of promises (and deadlines) made to customers. Team must continually balance scope of releases against hard dates.
  • Limitations in the technology architecture (e.g., reliance on Macromedia Flash) do not easily support  Agile techniques such as continuous integration and automated testing. This forces additional testing prior to a release that could not be completed during an iteration.
  • Now that development can deliver frequent software releases, marketing/communications must keep pace.

Key success factors/ Lessons learned

 

  • Online distributed toolset (Rally) provided visibility into features, tasks, quality, and progress; replaced paper story cards and team wiki. Team is now well positioned to support distributed and offshore team members.
  • Aligned product planning processes with Agile development processes.

Results and Metrics 

 

  • Since Agile development began in January 2004, team releases product upgrades and/or new products on a 6-8 week cycle.
  • Released major enhancements to core product; launched beta of new product (tested with 10,000+ students)
  • Migrated products to next generation of Microsoft technology (.NET 2.0 and SQL 2005)
  • In addition to the development and QA teams, the marketing and technical support departments participate on the project, providing and tracking new feature progress and reporting customer feedback.
  • Key metrics reported to management:
    • Month 1 defects
    • Unplanned downtime
    • Stories per release

 

One interesting point about staffing: even though Learning.com has three project managers, only one is fully engaged with the development organization. The other two face the market and "existing customers + salesforce," respectively. Collectively, it takes nearly three people to keep up with an Agile team and make sure a stream of high-quality stories continues to flow. 

About the Author
Liz Barnett is the Editor in Chief of the Agile Journal and Principal Analyst at EZ Insight Inc. Previously Liz spent 10 years as a Vice President and Research Analyst at Forrester Research, joining Forrester as a result of its acquisition of Giga Information Group. Liz held management positions at Accenture, PepsiCo, and Atelier Research. She also was the Research Director for the advanced software development and advanced network computing research services at New Science Associates, prior to its acquisition by Gartner Group. Liz holds a patent for developing a distributed application development/CASE tool. Liz earned her B.S. in operations research and industrial engineering at Cornell University.

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